Matt wrote:As I presume you live in the US, or some really freaky school in the Ulk who decided to use the US grade system, I would take Spanish. As far as I know, which is probably wrong, but still, the majority of South America speaks Spanish, so that gives you a doorway. Of course, a lot of Canada speaks French. I only know the basics of Spanish, but I'd have to say that French is probably easier, because of its similarity to English, so then that gives you an incentive to take that. They're both useful languages, so I doubt there is any real bad points about either, so I'm just going to suggest Spanish, as that's the only one with any headway, having been studied for a bit already.
All of Central and South America speak Spanish, except for Brazil, which speaks Portuguese; Guyana, which speaks English; and French Guyana (which has its own seats in the French Senate and everything - it's considered an equal department, like Hawaii in the US), where they speak French.
Spanish has as many similar words to English as French does...they're called cognates. It also has a lot of false cognates (ladies, don't tell someone you're <i>embarassada</i>, because it don't mean embarrased - it means pregnant).